Anglican Communion #5

The Anglican Communion is the family of churches — including the Church of England, the Episcopal Church in the United States, and national churches across the former British Empire — that trace their identity to the Church of England’s break from Rome, together claiming roughly 85 million members worldwide.

Origins and History

Anglicanism began in 1534 when King Henry VIII, after the pope refused to annul his marriage, had Parliament declare the English monarch head of the Church of England, separating it from Roman authority. Under his successors, the church absorbed genuine Reformation theology, most durably through the Book of Common Prayer (1549, revised 1662) and the Thirty-Nine Articles, while deliberately retaining much of the Catholic Church’s liturgical structure, vestments, and episcopal governance — a self-described “via media,” or middle way, between Rome and continental Protestantism. The Communion today is a voluntary global fellowship of independent national churches in historic relationship with the Archbishop of Canterbury, rather than a single governed body.

Beliefs and Practices

Anglican worship is liturgical and centered on the Book of Common Prayer, ordered around the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist and led by bishops, priests, and deacons in historic apostolic succession (Ephesians 4:11-13; 1 Corinthians 14:40). Anglicanism affirms Scripture as containing “all things necessary to salvation” (2 Timothy 3:16-17) while also valuing reason and tradition as interpretive lenses, producing a wide internal range from Anglo-Catholic parishes that closely resemble Catholic practice to Evangelical Anglican parishes that emphasize Reformation theology — a breadth that has also produced ongoing global tension over issues such as the ordination of women and sexuality.